Co-organized by Museum Tinguely and Kunsthalle Basel in partnership with Centre culturel suisse Paris, the symposium will take place at the two venues on 26 and 27 January, 2018. An international gathering of historians of performance art, artists, curators, and other practitioners will discuss the theoretical, historical, and practical aspects of performance art and its legacies.

The symposium will expand on the questions raised by the larger collaborative exhibition project PerformanceProcess regarding the role of the archive and documentation in relation to live art, the relationship of contemporary practices to the historical origins of performance, the ways in which different institutional contexts (museums, theaters, festivals, public spaces) have fostered distinct relationships to live arts, the relation of performance art to the traditions of dance, theatre, the art object, and installation, and, last but certainly not least, Switzerland’s unique performance art history.

PerformanceProcess. 60 Years of Performance Art in
Switzerland, Museum Tinguely

Performance by Heinrich Lüber, Volute

Session 3: Showing, Collecting and Sharing Performance Art

How does performativity survive the live event? How can the time - and site – specific experience of a live-performance be expanded into an artwork? How does an exhibition deal with such material? Keywords: protocols, sketches, props, video and photographs. Preparation, announcements, traces and reenactments. Materiality versus immateriality.

Introduction | Séverine Fromaigeat, Curator, Museum Tinguely

2:45 pm | Lecture (EN)

Catherine Wood

What Was / What Could Be / What Is:

Documents, Scores and Situations for Performance in the Museum

3:15pm | Short Input (DE)

Pascale Grau

Short Dicourse on Transforming Performance Art through Archives, Art Institutions and Artists in Switzerland

7:00 pm | Meta-Concert
Performance by Christian Marclay in relation to the work of Jean Tinguely. With the collaboration of Okkyung Lee on cello and Luc Müller on percussion, Museum Tinguely, cost: museum admision

6:30 pm
Closing remarks by Elena Filipovic and Séverine Fromaigeat, in English

27 January 2018 | Saturday | Following the symposium

Symposium Closing Party:

PerformanceProcess Night Out

Kunsthalle Bar
Music, food & drinks. You are warmly welcome!

We are happy to announce that our cooperation partner Kaserne Basel will host the performance of Alexandra Bachzetsis Private Song on the 24th and the 25th January 2018.

The breadth and diversity of Swiss performance art from 1960 to the present is being celebrated in Basel through an exceptional institutional collaboration between Museum Tinguely, Kaserne Basel, and Kunsthalle Basel in partnership with Centre culturel suisse Paris. Together these institutions illuminate performative practices in Switzerland- looking back, for instance, to when Jean Tinguely blew up the Basel Carnival Committee in a performative action in 1974, and looking forward, with new performances by established and emerging artists.

Spanning five months, from 20 September 2017 to 18 February 2018, this project has roots in the multidisciplinary exhibition and festival PerformanceProcess held in 2015 at the Centre culturel suisse in Paris. Building upon and expanding that effort, the Basel institutions join forces to examine this powerful medium, each from a distinct perspective:

In 1985 in New York and in 2006 in Philadelphia, Armleder and Marclay realized various performances together. Simultaneous Duo Versions was developed, performed and recorded on film on 11 March 2014 at the ECAL, Lausanne. They are united by an understanding of art that – in a very serious way – does not take itself at all seriously, that can work with much or very few resources.

Christian Marclay Meta-Concert
Performance by Christian Marclay in relation to the work of Jean Tinguely. With the collaboration of Okkyung Lee on cello and Luc Müller on percussion, Museum Tinguely, cost: museum admision

DAI is a robot with artificial intelligence developed by Jonathan O’Hear, Timothy O’Hear, and Martin Rautenstrauch, based on the choreographical philosophy of Foofwa d’Imobilité. DAI is meant to learn to dance and ultimately develop a certain stylistic autonomy.

Past live performances

Vernissage

from 6.30 pm onwards
Massimo Furlan, Blue Tired Heroes
A group of older “Blue Tired Heroes” strolls through the museum in Superman costumes.

Ioannis Mandafounis und Aoife McAtamney, One One One
One One One, created in 2015, is the first joint project by Mandafounis and McAtamney. In a public place, outdoors or indoors, two empty chairs invite sitters to spend some time. As soon as a person takes a seat, one of the dancers tries to catch the sitter’s eye and dances for as long as eye contact is maintained.

at 7.15 pm Katja Schenker, Forteresse
Forteresse is performance and sculpture simultaneously. The artist first builds a polygonal structure in clay. For her performance she positions herself in the middle of the construction and cuts up the walls in a physically very elaborate gesture with the aid of a cord.Forteresse was realized for the first time in 2011 in Geneva.

at 7.30-8.30 pm Gianni Motti, Real Time
Motti’s work is based on the unexpected – always true to his motto, “wrong place, right time”, he invites himself to places where nobody is expecting him. For PerformanceProcess he awaits visitors during the opening on 19 September 2017 at 7:30 pm Park – anything can happen.

Live performances in November

Conférence de choses is a collaborative and encyclopedic stroll through the field of contemporary knowledge. The script also leaves room for improvisations, which react to the context of the performance. From 14 to 18 November the conference takes place in different 53 min. versions at five locations in Basel. On 19 November a 5 hours conference will be presented at Museum Tinguely.

For PerformanceProcess at Museum Tinguely Anne Rochat develops a new performance featuring the musician Laurent Bruttin in which she explores a persistent, altered state of consciousness.

Roman Signer

showing of Restenfilme withStefan Rusconi (Live-Piano)

18 November 2017
4 pm

Restenfilme is a cut-up of the edited scenes, out-takes and technical markings for the experimental
Super 8 films produces by Signer. The projection of this montage is accompanied by live music by the pianist Stefan Rusconi.
5.30 pm

Roman SignerPresentation of a new performance
18 November 2017
5.30 pm

Live performances in December

Martina-Sofie WildbergerSpeak Up!
2 December 2017

12–3 pm

Speak up! is a performance with three performers (Tobias Bienz, Denise Hasler, Julia Sewing) and the artist. Each performer reads out texts of everyday or historical origin and moves about the space in a modular choreography as they do so.

Schaffter and Stünzi demonstrate how sovereignty over the social shaping of reality can be reconquered. They build study objects during a preparatory phase on site. Schaffter presents and analyses these newly created “sculptures” during the performance.

Gisela HochuliIn Touch with M.O.
2 December 2017
3.45 pm

With In Touch with M.O. Hochuli refers to the works of the artist Meret Oppenheim (M.O.), her aesthetic, but also her materiality and historical and social dimensions.

Keep it Fun for Yourself, 1995–2017
Duyvendak performs a cappella songs that are devoted to art and question the role of the artist.

Self-service, 2003
A camera on a tripod is focused on the photo of a concrete building, the image appears on a monitor. In the artist’s hands the moving screen ultimately no longer transmits the still image, but begins to record new aspects of the building like a camera.